EDITORIAL: Russia, Sicker by the Minute

Russian officials have said Michael Lee White was a U.S. agent involved in the recent fighting between their troops and Georgia. They claim to have found the Army veteran’s passport in Georgia’s breakaway province of South Ossetia. But in his cramped teacher’s apartment at a business college in southern China, the American said Wednesday that he’d never been to Georgia. When the five-day war was raging last month, White said, he was in his hometown of Austin, Texas, caring for his sick father. The CIA denied that White was working for it. White thinks the passport the Russians have is one he lost during a flight from Moscow to New York in October 2005. White said he reported his lost passport and was given a new one the same year. “It still seems bizarre that they would make accusations like that with so little evidence,” said White, a soft-spoken English teacher. Russian officials have suggested that Americans directly supported Georgia’s Aug. 7 assault on South Ossetia, which is backed by Russia. Russian Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, showed reporters a copy of what he said was White’s passport Aug. 28. He said it was found in a basement among items that belonged to retreating Georgian soldiers.

Russia is a sick society, and it is getting sicker by the minute. And we don’t mean physically sick, although Russia is about as ill in that manner as you can get, with the average male not living to see his sixtieth year and pandemic crises in AIDS, smoking, drinking and all manner of accident fatality. What we’re talking about is between the ears: Russia is a mental case.

So, it’s like this apparently: Three years ago an American loses his passport in Russia, and the Russian government finds it and keeps it. That’s bad enough, you might say, but it’s nothing compared to what comes next. Fast forward to the Georgia invasion and Russia’s utter repudiation as a wanton aggressor nation — a bully, a thug — by the entire planet. Shocked by the breadth and depth of its apocalyptic failure, instead of seeking to make amends Russia rushes forward with the passport, claiming it belongs to a venal CIA spy who fomented the Georgia crisis. In fact, it belongs to a poor teacher living in China.

What can you say about a country that would sink this low? That could sink this low this fast? That would tell such utterly ridiculous lies and think they might be believed? How can such a country be called anything other than neo-Soviet? How is this latest insanity in any way different from the worst displays produced by the USSR?

Amazingly, Russians are still not yet satisfied with their failure. Just as in Soviet times, they seem hellbent on increasing it to truly messianic levels. The LA Times also reports that crazed Russian nationalist Aleksandr Dugin “envisions a strategic bloc comprising the former Soviet Union and the Middle East to rival the U.S.-dominated Atlantic alliance.” And how about the fact that the Georgia invasion has polarized most of the former USSR into the NATO fold? Does it matter that the Middle East is composed of Muslims such as those Russia has been blithely slaughtering for years in Chechnya? Is it of any significance whatsoever that NATO out-guns Russia by many orders of magnitude, that the economy of the U.S. alone is 12 times larger than Russia’s? Of course not! Unable to perceive even the vaguest hint of reality, Dugin, when asked how Russia views the development of friendly relations between the United States and former Soviet republics such as Ukraine and Georgia, answers: “As a declaration of war. As a declaration of psychological, geopolitical, economic and open war.”

So, yes, you understand correctly, American is not allowed to have friendly relations with Ukraine and Georgia. Russia, of course, is free to sell weapons to Venezuela, Iran and Syria, all hardened U.S. foes. Russia has been spurned by the globe, and now it is going to willfully and directly provoke the world’s only superpower into an immediate confrontation copying the one that destroyed the USSR utterly.

And that, in a nutshell (and we do mean nut) is Russia’s current “foreign policy.”

Russia can either stop being governed by the madman called Putin or it can stop existing. It’s just that simple.

6 responses to “EDITORIAL: Russia, Sicker by the Minute”

Plus ca change. The NKVD stole hundreds of passports from gullible Westerne socialists who went to Spain to fight in the civil war in the 1930s. They shipped them back to Moscow and used them in various espionage activities. I guess that somewhere in the archives there is a stash of the unused ones waiting to be found.

The passport was not NECESSARILY kept by the Russian Government. I saw a documentary about a year ago (I forget the actual name of it) where a woman made herself a goal to aquire fake passports of all EU countries and use some of them to get into the countries to see if it can be done. It could. Apparently the most common way of faking a passport was just changing the picture in a stolen or lost passport. Not the best quality, usually, but one such did pass through the customs when she tried. So this MIGHT have been one such case, Georgians like USA, after all.

but otherwise agree with the diagnosis of paranoia and mania grandiosa for Russia.

In the 1930s many Western socialists WERE gullible. To be fair, by 1936 the Soviets had started shooting quite a few Western socialists who had gone to the USSR to help build socialism and had abducted and shot enough in Spain for the light to begin to dawn. Some of them woke up. But before that (ie the early 1930s) most socialists in the West were pro-Soviet.

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